How To Tell Intuition From Anxiety

Does your anxiety make gaining access to your intuition challenging? This is a common issue you might be experiencing during your spiritual awakening, where you want to trust yourself and listen to your gut, but get thrown off by your fears. These fears can overwhelm you and trick you by wearing your intuition as a mask. Let this concept be a relief to you–your anxiety is not your intuition! Here are some tips on how to tell your intuition from your anxiety:

Get in touch with your emotions and your body

How do you feel? What is your gut telling you? Get to know yourself. When your intuition is speaking to you, it is a calm voice from within. Anxiety evolves from a place of fear and is usually a reaction to a threat. Your anxiety is trying to protect you from harm. Intuition doesn’t come from a place of fear–it just comes to you, seemingly out of nowhere. It is a message from your higher self, who isn’t trying to scare you but inform you. It is clear, and it is accompanied by feelings of relaxation, inner knowing, and reason. Anxiety does not have reason and is usually irrational.

Noticing how your body feels when you’re anxious will help you determine whether or not it’s your intuition or your anxiety speaking to you. When you are experiencing anxiety, you start to sweat, your heart rate goes up, you lose your appetite, and you might feel a little shaky. Additionally, if it is anxiety, you might feel like you want to hide in bed under the covers all day. With your intuition, however, you’ll feel more confident in yourself and your ability to face whatever it is that you need to face because you will just know, and you will fully trust yourself.

Learn to reduce your anxiety

If your anxiety is overwhelming you to the point that you are unable to listen to your intuition, here are some ways you can treat your anxiety so you can fully access your higher wisdom:

• Put your hand on your heart and give yourself positive self-talk
• Challenge your negative thoughts and replace them with happier ones
• Bring your fears to light so that you can accept them and reduce their intensity

Train your mind to listen to a different narrative

We have trouble listening to our intuition when we are operating on a false narrative. Sometimes the stories that we tell ourselves aren’t true but have been embedded in our psyche because of events that have happened to us throughout our lives. These events and experiences have caused us to look at the world through the lens of this story, which might not even be true. This makes it difficult to listen to our intuition.

To combat this, whenever you are feeling anxious and having trouble listening to your intuition because of that anxiety, get out a pen and a piece of paper and write an alternate story to the one that you are telling yourself. Write as many different possibilities as you can think of. Make sure you state the facts. Your brain has a tendency to cling to shreds of information that aren’t true but add to the narrative, so make sure you are very straightforward and factual with yourself when dealing with your anxiety. This will help you start to discern whether it’s your anxiety or intuition talking.

In our article last week, guest writer Sunny Ebsary tells us his experience with art therapy and how important it was in his healing process. Click here to read it!

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Starting with a creative written voice and a BA in English from ASU, Alli Cravener has become so much more than Integrative Counsel’s voice! Not only is she a writer who is passionate about connecting concepts and content, Alli is also currently a grad student working towards her Master’s in Counseling. She is also the editor-in-chief, office manager, AND intake specialist at Integrative Counsel. When you call us, you’ll talk to Alli! Alli’s interests include painting, history, learning about other people, and wearing the color pink. She likens herself to a “mouse in a palm tree”, and she loves it that way.